MSFN is made available via donations, subscriptions and advertising revenue. The use of ad-blocking software hurts the site. Please disable ad-blocking software or set an exception for MSFN. Alternatively, register and become a site sponsor/subscriber and ads will be disabled automatically.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Today, I had some more personal experience with Windows 10, and I don't even know how to put in words how horrible this operating system is. A friend of mine tried to install a free trial of office 365 in his MS Account enabled Windows 10 installation (upgraded from Windows 8.1 w/ MS Acct) There was an issue with the installation, so MS telephone support instructed him to use system restore. Apparently, in doing so, his MS Acct password was corrupted, so he couldn't log into his account. So he calls me and I come over with my "NT Password Reset" CD that I use to get into locked accounts, and has worked all the way through Win8. I boot from the CD and it refuses to mount the NTFS volume because it thought it was hibernated. (most likely the fast boot) While working on that, I had another PC, so I Googled how to get to the WinPE command prompt, as with a UEFI box F8 doesn't work well. (I have gotten Win10 into WinPE on BIOS computers before though) After a little bit of searching, I found out that you can get into the advanced boot menu by SHIFT-clicking on Restart on the login screen. So I eventually get to the elevated command prompt... but the keyboard doesn't work. I tried numerous times, and got the same result. By this point, I was getting really pissed off, so I decided to try the NT Password Reset CD again, and this time it mounted. I go in, clear the password for the MS account, enable the built-in Admin account for good measure, and reboot. Naturally, the MS Acct PW wasn't cleared, but at least I had the Admin account to log into. I log into the Admin account and reset the MS account password online (what the login prompts told us to do) and tried logging in with the new PW, but this time the error was that the PC was offline and we had to use the last good password. (NOTE: The PC WAS online, I had Firefox open with a webpage loaded in the Admin account) I was getting tired of this, and started backing up all of his files for a reformat. While the files were copying, I needed to use the Calculator for something, so I run calc.exe from the Run dialog, and what do I get? "The Calculator can not be started from the built-in administrator account, try logging in as a different user" (I ended up copying calc.exe from the WinXP box sitting next to this one) This is when I decided to just go home and get my Windows 7 DVD and install that instead. I think I spent 6 hours fixing an issue that wouldn't exist in Windows 7.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

A peculiar problem surfaced the other day when a friend told me of how her new Win10 laptop was having some trouble migrating her email account into the new Mail App.

It turns out she ran the wizard to let the app import her existing mail from her web mail domain- and that appears to have succeeded, but then for some reason her newly imported email account was defaulted to send only, and was unable to receive email from outside of MS own welcome message. There was just one message bar that said outlook.com could add additional accounts, but it took sometime to find the right buttons to press. I configured her iphone to do the same thing in a 1/10 of the time, and I don't even own, or profess to know how to use even one.

In the end it was a matter of configuring the Mail app from her newly generated MS cloud account to modify the basically local settings for the send & receive server ports and ip's. Hiding behind little cog icons and unhelpful hotlinks.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

LOL, I just did a geeky thing and lo and behold the new CMD window behaved in a remarkably wrong way...

I grabbed a command out of a script and pasted it into the CMD window.

A filename showed up in front of the command!

Why?

Because the command line I grabbed had a TAB in front of it, rather than spaces. Pasting it in made the CMD processor think that I'd typed TAB, looking to use one of the filenames in the current folder.

All that's left at Microsoft are junior programmers who insist on redoing everything and believe they actually know how to make things better than what took their predecessors an entire lifetime to polish.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Today, I had some more personal experience with Windows 10, and I don't even know how to put in words how horrible this operating system is. A friend of mine tried to install a free trial of office 365 in his MS Account enabled Windows 10 installation (upgraded from Windows 8.1 w/ MS Acct) There was an issue with the installation, so MS telephone support instructed him to use system restore. Apparently, in doing so, his MS Acct password was corrupted, so he couldn't log into his account. So he calls me and I come over with my "NT Password Reset" CD that I use to get into locked accounts, and has worked all the way through Win8. I boot from the CD and it refuses to mount the NTFS volume because it thought it was hibernated. (most likely the fast boot) While working on that, I had another PC, so I Googled how to get to the WinPE command prompt, as with a UEFI box F8 doesn't work well. (I have gotten Win10 into WinPE on BIOS computers before though) After a little bit of searching, I found out that you can get into the advanced boot menu by SHIFT-clicking on Restart on the login screen. So I eventually get to the elevated command prompt... but the keyboard doesn't work. I tried numerous times, and got the same result. By this point, I was getting really p***ed off, so I decided to try the NT Password Reset CD again, and this time it mounted. I go in, clear the password for the MS account, enable the built-in Admin account for good measure, and reboot. Naturally, the MS Acct PW wasn't cleared, but at least I had the Admin account to log into. I log into the Admin account and reset the MS account password online (what the login prompts told us to do) and tried logging in with the new PW, but this time the error was that the PC was offline and we had to use the last good password. (NOTE: The PC WAS online, I had Firefox open with a webpage loaded in the Admin account) I was getting tired of this, and started backing up all of his files for a reformat. While the files were copying, I needed to use the Calculator for something, so I run calc.exe from the Run dialog, and what do I get? "The Calculator can not be started from the built-in administrator account, try logging in as a different user" (I ended up copying calc.exe from the WinXP box sitting next to this one) This is when I decided to just go home and get my Windows 7 DVD and install that instead. I think I spent 6 hours fixing an issue that wouldn't exist in Windows 7.

Seen this issue myself a few times now. If the user has a cloud enabled account not a local one it can be a pain, also getting into BIOS and getting the NT reset disk to mount can take a while and a lot of language - and even then after resetting the corrupted password and getting back into the user account myriads of problems present an increasing level of frustration until when trying to restore............. its easier to wipe the thing and install Windows clean ..... Again! I did find a registry fix a few months back for a corrupt Win10 system partition where you use cmd line on a restore disk to restore the registry to the last working version it had which cured a lot of start up issues, but it is hugely irritating to have to do all this faffing about merely to reset a password corruption.

I think the answer for my stuff and clients is to keep a backup image of every one I do for easy reset, but then I have tried this and have a 50% success rate - it either works of windows cannot find a valid restore image.

So I dunno - put everyone back on Windows 7 I think is the way I am going to go now.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

So I dunno - put everyone back on Windows 7 I think is the way I am going to go now.

That makes a lot of sense and cuts right to the heart of the issue. People simply expect Windows to be a computer operating system on their computers - not some cloud-integrated play toy environment whose biggest accomplishment is updating itself. Continuously.

You do know that we're no longer supposed to want computers, right?

-Noel

2

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Today, I had some more personal experience with Windows 10, and I don't even know how to put in words how horrible this operating system is. A friend of mine tried to install a free trial of office 365 in his MS Account enabled Windows 10 installation (upgraded from Windows 8.1 w/ MS Acct) There was an issue with the installation, so MS telephone support instructed him to use system restore. Apparently, in doing so, his MS Acct password was corrupted, so he couldn't log into his account. So he calls me and I come over with my "NT Password Reset" CD that I use to get into locked accounts, and has worked all the way through Win8. I boot from the CD and it refuses to mount the NTFS volume because it thought it was hibernated. (most likely the fast boot) While working on that, I had another PC, so I Googled how to get to the WinPE command prompt, as with a UEFI box F8 doesn't work well. (I have gotten Win10 into WinPE on BIOS computers before though) After a little bit of searching, I found out that you can get into the advanced boot menu by SHIFT-clicking on Restart on the login screen. So I eventually get to the elevated command prompt... but the keyboard doesn't work. I tried numerous times, and got the same result. By this point, I was getting really p***ed off, so I decided to try the NT Password Reset CD again, and this time it mounted. I go in, clear the password for the MS account, enable the built-in Admin account for good measure, and reboot. Naturally, the MS Acct PW wasn't cleared, but at least I had the Admin account to log into. I log into the Admin account and reset the MS account password online (what the login prompts told us to do) and tried logging in with the new PW, but this time the error was that the PC was offline and we had to use the last good password. (NOTE: The PC WAS online, I had Firefox open with a webpage loaded in the Admin account) I was getting tired of this, and started backing up all of his files for a reformat. While the files were copying, I needed to use the Calculator for something, so I run calc.exe from the Run dialog, and what do I get? "The Calculator can not be started from the built-in administrator account, try logging in as a different user" (I ended up copying calc.exe from the WinXP box sitting next to this one) This is when I decided to just go home and get my Windows 7 DVD and install that instead. I think I spent 6 hours fixing an issue that wouldn't exist in Windows 7.

What a nightmare.

If this were the Microsoft Insiders forum, at this point we'd have some clueless fanboi chiming in to say that everything's hunky-dory with his Win10 system and 7 wasn't perfect, so why are you complaining?

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

A peculiar problem surfaced the other day when a friend told me of how her new Win10 laptop was having some trouble migrating her email account into the new Mail App.

It turns out she ran the wizard to let the app import her existing mail from her web mail domain- and that appears to have succeeded, but then for some reason her newly imported email account was defaulted to send only[...]

I guess that in their infinite, telemetry-driven wisdom, the sages at Microsoft must have decided that people send out e-mail but don't read what they receive, and therefore that should be the default setting.

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Thing is, Windows 7 wasn't just a hodgepodge of thrown together stuff. It had been refined to be able to do things like give you options if you got into a bind.

Remember the horror of the first systems that wouldn't boot you into DOS? Whatever would we do if something went wrong? In the almost 2 decades between that and 2009 a great deal of effort went into seeing to it that we could do at least something if everything wasn't hunky dory. I've restored systems via the WinRE environment. It's hardly ever needed, but when you need the power you need the power!

How do the youngsters at Microsoft even presume that just changing things wholesale without thinking it all through could possibly work?

And no, we "oldsters" who are complaining about how Windows 10 is worse aren't just dinosaur stick-in-the-muds. We're the experienced ones who know that important stuff can be lost when things don't go right.

-Noel

Edited February 22, 2016 by NoelC

1

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

Here’s a simple example: If you watch movies or television shows on your PC, chances are you play them back with either VLC or an application like Media Player Classic. If you’re a gamer, you use Steam. If you use instant messenger services, there’s already a suite of applications that can handle them.

In the early days of the iPhone — at least after Apple unveiled the App Store in 2008, a year after launch — Apple showcased the phone by running the tagline “There’s an app for that.” In a way, that’s the PC’s problem: There’s already an app for that, and if you’ve been using the desktop for 10-20 years, you probably know which ones you like and which you don’t.

Microsoft has tried to offer compelling applications built around its new UI, but these applications are often handicapped by intrinsic limitations that their desktop brethren don’t share. Adobe Photoshop’s mobile version can’t use plug-ins, because Microsoft’s API doesn’t allow them for security reasons. Even applications as simple as photo viewers or video players expect all content to reside in a single privileged directory. The problem is, that’s not how most PC users maintain content libraries, especially over a 5-10 year period.

--JorgeA

1

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

The governement of the autonomic region of Andalusia in Spain has developed an own freeware Linux based OS which is already taught and used for educational purposes all over its territory, and eventually could also be used as soon as they wish for administrative purposes. Children learn to use this at school.

You may freely download this public program (spanish only) from this adress:

This is an example of what may also happen in a near future. Big corporations and enterprises using thousands of computers havingtheir ownIT staff could do the same to preserve their security, alsosavinglarge amounts ofmoney by nothaving to payanylicense at all.